It wasn’t until Sunday night that Mark Jackson found out who he was now. Wicklow had delivered their first victory of the Division Four campaign earlier in the day, stretching clear of London with a fizzing second-half display in Aughrim. The margin in the end was seven points, two of them long-range frees from Jackson’s right boot. Nothing new there.
Except there was, in a way. Jackson’s two kicks pushed him past the 100-point mark in the league and championship, putting him in a tiny group of inter-county keepers who have passed the milestone. Since his debut in 2017, the Wicklow goalie has put up 62 points in the league and 39 in championship.
If this comes as news to you, don’t feel bad. It came as news to him too. As ever, the GAA’s dearth of centrally-held statistics means that the only reason anyone knows about Jackson’s 100 points is that someone in his county took it upon themselves to track them. In this case, the hero is a Twitter account called BillHillWicklow. We will come back to them in a bit.
“I hadn’t a clue at all, to tell you the truth,” Jackson says. “I didn’t know at all. It was only on Sunday evening, a couple of lads sent me the BillHill thing but I wouldn’t have a clue how many points I have only for that. I wouldn’t keep track of that kind of thing at all. I couldn’t even have told you I was up around it. It was a nice surprise to get anyway.”
For a sense of how rare the 100-point haul is, we went on a bit of a rummage during the week. As far as we can make out, Jackson is only the third inter-county keeper to pass 100 points. Monaghan’s Rory Beggan was the first to do so back in 2020, Tyrone’s Niall Morgan followed him last year in a league game against Kildare. Otherwise – and readers are by all means invited to tell us we’re talking through our hat here – nobody else has done it.
These numbers only exist, of course, because of the efforts of a necklace of demonically committed scorekeepers across the land. We can say with confidence that Beggan has scored 113 points in 113 games for Monaghan only because Colm Shalvey of the Northern Standard collates these things. Ditto Niall Morgan’s 103 points in 107 games – former county PRO Eunan Lindsay is the man who keeps track of all facts Tyrone.
In Cavan, word comes via Lochlann Egan that Ray Galligan has 83 points in 91 goalkeeper appearances. Gerry Callan’s immense book of Dublin numbers tells us that Stephen Cluxton scored 66 points in his career. The Mayo GAA blog has Rob Hennelly on 43 points in 86 games. Granular stuff, the kind of thing that keeps every sport rolling over, feeding the chat, spicing the discourse.
We got on to BillHillWicklow to give them their due for sending the Jackson stat out into the world. But while they don’t mind getting a shout-out in the Irish Times, they don’t, in their own words “want too much commotion”. They’re just a couple of lads who try to promote Wicklow GAA and get the word out about good causes if they can. But they’d love if stats people in other counties would connect with them. Their DMs are open.
All going well, Jackson will be keeping them busy for years to come. His free-taking has been one of the most consistent building blocks of Wicklow scoring totals for six seasons now. On his championship debut against Offaly in 2018, he scored 0-7 from eight kicks and saved a penalty in an extra-time victory.
Wicklow football chops and changes with the tides, the player churn matched only by the new faces at the helm. But from John Evans that day to Oisín McConville now, Jackson has been a constant, a first-choice stopper and shooter under five different managerial regimes. His range is prodigious, his kicking style straight and true and very useful to have around.
“I leave it up to the forwards to decide if they want me to take one,” he says. “The inside forwards are the scorers – whatever they’re comfortable with and confident in, that’s up to them. I suppose anything from 35-40 metres out, I’ll take it.
“If you’re a freetaker of any sort, you have to relish the pressure of it. You have to be able to keep the same concentration and the same technique at high-pressure moments as you do when you’re practising. You can’t really practise the pressure of the last minute of a game being down a point or whatever but you can make sure you’re ready when it happens.
“I think every player wants to be the one who kicks the winner. You want that pressure. I definitely enjoy that aspect of it, trying to be the one who the team relies on to kick the free at high-pressure times.”
No goalkeeper has ever scored this much at this stage of his career. Beggan and Morgan are 31. Galligan is 35. Hennelly will be 33 in a couple of weeks. At just 24, there’s every chance Jackson will end his career as the top-scoring goalkeeper in the history of the game.
Kick by kick, he’s pushing back the boundary rope, whether he realises it or not.
